What is BitTorrent?
Easy, step-by-step guide for those who have heard of KaZaA and other file-sharing programs, but are looking for a faster and safer way to download movies, music, TV shows, anime, and just about anything else you can think of. Many people are still unaware of what exactly BitTorrent is or what it does. BitTorrent is a P2P protocol, or method, that allows people to share data much more efficiently and at much greater transfer speeds than previous file-sharing software like KaZaA, Morpheus, and WinMX. These programs were Direct Connect types in that each person connected directly and solely to one other user in order to share files. The drawback of this is that the person receiving the data is limited by the upload connection speed of the person sending it. What BitTorrent does is remove this limitation by allowing a virtually unlimited number of people to connect to one another and share the same file at the same time. Instead of being limited by the upload speed of the other user one is
What it is Bittorrent is a cooperative distribution of content where each individual who is downloading (and those who have downloaded) the content use their upload capacity to give the content to others. Traditional distribution of content relied upon a single server providing the content. However, this creates a vicious circle where the distributor is punished as the content becomes more popular. The more people that download the content, the higher the bandwidth cost to the distributor. If the content becomes very popular and the server is flooded with requests for download, then the server crashes and no one receives the content. Thus, only those with special equipment and lots of money were able to adequately distribute content. Bittorrent allows individuals, and small enterprises, to distribute their content as effectively as traditional distribution, but at a small cost. In bittorrent the popularity of a content creates a virtuous circle where the more popular the content is, th
